Ad Campaigns
Star Sports launches new campaign for ICC Women’s World T20 2018
MUMBAI: Star Sports has unveiled a new campaign for this year’s ICC Women’s World T20. The film captures the narrative of a girl who wants to play cricket, but is denied the opportunity at first, until she decides to take initiative and show her ability to the world.
The TVC, shot in Kashmir, highlights the emotions that girls across the world go through when it comes to stereotypes attached to playing sports. From being picked in the local Sunday team or getting the opportunity to play, girls are often left out, despite possessing the skills to compete.
Built on the core thought of letting the bat do the talking, “Ab inka balla bolega”, the campaign drives home the fact that anyone can excel at the world stage if given the right platform and opportunity, as seen by the ‘Women in Blue’ and their breakout run at the ICC Women’s World Cup 2017.
Apart from the TVC, the campaign also urges us to encourage talent with an equal lens, irrespective of gender in every sphere of life, by launching the #GiftABat movement.
The Indian women’s team, led by Harmanpreet Kaur, will face New Zealand in their opening game of the tournament on 9 November 2018. Besides New Zealand, Australia, Ireland and traditional rivals – Pakistan are the other teams pitted in the same group as India. Fans can catch all the action starting 8.30 pm on SS1 – SS1 HD and Hotstar.
NATIONAL: Amazon Ads has laid out a sharply tech-led vision for the advertising industry in 2026, arguing that artificial intelligence, streaming TV and creator partnerships will combine to turn brand building into a more precise, performance-driven business.
At the heart of the shift, the company says, is the fusion of AI with Amazon’s vast trove of shopping, browsing and streaming signals, allowing advertisers to move beyond blunt reach metrics to campaigns designed around real customer behaviour.
“The future of advertising is not about reaching more people, but the right people with messages that resonate,” said Amazon Ads India head and vice president Girish Prabhu. “By combining AI with deep customer insights, we help brands move from broadcasting campaigns to having meaningful conversations wherever audiences spend their time.”
One of the biggest changes, according to Amazon Ads, will be the collapse of the wall between media planning and creative development. Retail media, powered by first-party data, is increasingly shaping everything from brand discovery to final purchase, pushing marketers to design campaigns around audience insight rather than internal instinct.
AI is also moving from a support tool to a creative engine. Agentic AI, which automates and accelerates production, is expected to make high-quality creative accessible even to small businesses, compressing weeks of work into hours and giving challengers the ability to compete with larger brands on speed and scale.
Behind the scenes, AI-driven analytics will take on a bigger role in campaign optimisation, identifying patterns, spotting opportunities and recommending actions that would previously have required teams of analysts.
Streaming TV is another big battleground. With India’s video streaming audience now above 600 million and connected TV users at 129.2 million in 2025, advertisers are set to treat streaming not just as a branding channel but as a performance engine, measured increasingly by sales, sign-ups and bookings rather than just reach.
Finally, Amazon Ads sees creators and contextual advertising reshaping how brands tell stories. Creators will act less like influencers and more like long-term partners, while scene-aware ads on streaming platforms will allow brands to insert hyper-relevant offers into the flow of what viewers are watching.
Taken together, Amazon Ads argues, these shifts mark a move towards advertising that is both more human and more measurable, where AI handles the complexity, and creativity does the persuading.
